Time once more for one of America’s forgotten criminals, a young man whose callousness and egotism proved his undoing and whose crime assured him a place in State history. Given his nickname, you’ve probably already guessed that he came from Georgia. His name was Frank Dupre, his crime was murder during an armed robbery and he was the last man sentenced to hang in Georgia. But we’ll be getting to the historic aspect of his case a little later. For now, we’ll take a trip to Christmas, 1921 where the tale of Frank Dupre, Georgia’s notorious ‘Peachtree Bandit,’ really begins.
Frank Dupre, the ‘Peachtree Bandit.’
Like most young men, Frank had an eye for the ladies. In fact, he had his eye that Christmas on one particular lady, but there was a small problem. She had expensive tastes and he was a champagne chap with a beer budget. If he wanted a relationship with her, she told him, then she’d expect the finer things in life. She probably wasn’t expecting how far he’d go to obtain them. Nor were the staff of a jewellery store on Peachtree Street in Atlanta that Christmas when he walked in to ask about an expensive ring.
Polite and well-dressed, looking eminently respectable, Dupre asked an assistant to show him a ring marked at $2500, a very substantial sum for a ring in those days. As one assistant allowed him to hold it up to the light and assess its worth another, actually a Pinkerton detective named Irby Walker who was there to protect against robbers, discreetly moved near the door in case the young gentleman should try running off with the item.
Dupre did exactly that. In the process he also pulled a .38 revolver and fatally shot Irby Walker before charging through the Christmas crowds, pausing only by the Kimball House when bystander Graham West tried to stop him. Not content with the fatal shooting of Irby Walker, Dupre promptly shot Wet in the face and neck which almost killed him. Almost, but not quite. The survival of Mr. West would come back to haunt the Peachtree Bandit later in his short life. To be shot at close range in the head and neck and survive might have led many people to think that Graham West had been very lucky. West probably thought he’d have ben luckier if Dupre had missed.
With Walker dead and West not far off, Dupre charged down an alley and into a nearby pool hall, exiting by the front lobby where he promptly vanished into the gathering darkness. A nearby police officer rushed into the pool hall, having heard the shots while walking his beat. On asking the customers, however, it seemed that none of them had seen anybody arrive or leave.
Lieutenant Olin Sturdivant was assigned the task of identifying and catching him, a task given high priority by Dupre’s obvious willingness to kill in cold blood. Sturdivant arrived minutes after the robbery, having raced to the scene as soon as the report came into the police station. Contrary to Dupre’s asinine boast about the dumbness of the police, Sturdivant would get his man.
He already had a good description of Dupre as around 18 years old wearing a newsboy’s cap, brown suit, gray overcoat and a loud multi-colored tie. He also had something that really made his man stand out, an unusual variance in Dupre’s eye color. Soon he had more than that. He questioned the pool hall customers more closely and soon found one who actually had seen a young man answering the bandit’s description. Granted the witness saw neither a gun or a cap, but with their memories refreshed several other witnesses confirmed the initial report.
Sturdivant’s men worked through nearby stores on a store-by-store basis looking for clues. A men’s clothing store owner told them that he’d sold a black tie to a young man answering the bandit’s description. Another witness, barber Frank Foster who later joined the detective branch of the Atlanta police, told them he’d given the suspect a shampoo and a haircut, identifying him as the suspect by having noticed he was wearing a black tie and carrying a newsboy’s cap in his jacket pocket.
What Sturdivant lacked was forensic evidence. There were no fingerprints found in any of the stores or the pool hall. But Sturdivant correctly surmised that, if a young man steals expensive jewellery on Christmas then he probably wants it for a young lady. He was dead right.
Another witness was found, a cab driver named C.R. Buckley was the only cabbie in the area who might have picked up the suspect. There was, however, a problem. According to his boss, Buckley had been due to return at the end of his shift. Despite being several hours overdue he hadn’t called them either. Why? His curiosity aroused, Sturdivant ordered that Buckley be questioned when (or possibly if) he turned up.
Georgia didn’t have a crime lab at the time, so in order to try and match the bullets he had with a gun he still didn’t, Sturdivant relied on the help of a local gun expert and an improvised ballistics check. He took a piece of tinfoil from a cigarette packet, laid it firmly on a piece of leather over a flat surface, and gently rolled the bullets over the foil. If he found the murder weapon then test-fired rounds would confirm it as the gun used to murder Irby Walker and almost murder Graham West. The local gun expert soon confirmed the bullets as coming from a popular .38 revolver, readily available anywhere.
Enter C.R. Buckley, the cabbie who would prove lethally gabby for Frank Dupre. He told detectives that he’d picked up a fare who’d asked to be taken to Chattanooga, rather a long ride with the meter running. Detectives certainly thought so, making a mental note to look at Buckley and his story more closely.
Betty Andrews, Dupre’s girlfriend.
An informant also disclosed the name of a young lady apparently called ‘E.J. Anderson’ whose real name turned out to be Betty Andrews. The informant also mentioned that, in their view and according to what they’d heard, Betty Andrews had a boyfriend and the boyfriend was the Peachtree Bandit. The boyfriend turned out to be none other than Frank Dupre, who just happened to have dropped out of sight on Christmas Eve, the day of the robbery.
Buckley (the gabby cabbie) had lied and his lies were exposed when Sturdivant took a look inside his cab. Many cabs have pockets inside the doors and Bucley’s was no exception. In one pocket Sturdivant found a fat roll of dollars. In the other he found a .38 revolver of a popular brand.
A recently-fired .38 revolver of a popular brand.
That still had spent cartridges in the cylinder.
More of Sturdivant’s home-made ballistics proved to a jury’s satisfaction that it was the murder weapon. Buckley, panicking, claimed the money was his while denying any knowledge of the weapon. Finally, he cracked. He claimed that Dupre had hailed him and wanted to go to Marietta, but at Marietta had pulled the revolver and ordered him to drive on to Chattanooga. Bizarrely for so arrogant a felon, Dupre had told Buckley that he intended to pawn the ring, even naming the Chattanooga pawn shop he had in mind for the sale.
Unfortunately, the Chattanooga detectives missed their chance to arrest Dupre. Despite being in the sotre when Dupre arrived they missed him because the pawnbroker had hidden him in a back room when they arrived, telling them that he’d never heard of Dupre. With the detectives safely distracted, the pawnbroker gave Dupre $300 all in $50 bills. He also told Dupre to write to him enclosing the pawnbroker’s ticket to receive another $300 as he didn’t keep that much cash in the store.
Sturdivant and Pinkerton agent E.F. Fenn immediately headed for Chattanooga. Threatening the pawnbroker with a lengthy spell on one of Georgia’s rather unpleasant chain gangs helped him decide to hand over the stolen ring and identify Dupre. Further help came from a clerk at the railroad station who told them he’d sold a ticket to Norfolk, Virginia to Dupre. Dupre had slipped the net again, but not as well as he thought.
Dupre’s arrogance and callous attitude were amply proved when he wrote to one of Atlanta’s daily newspapers, proving his guilt by signing the letter ‘Dupre.’ In the missive he stated coldly:
“The police are dumb. They couldn’t catch a cold. Why, after the shooting, I walked the streets and elbowed with the crowd at the scene for fully forty minutes. I’m sorry I had to kill Mr. Walker, but I’m glad I shot Mr. West. He should have had better sense than to get in my way.”
Dupre’s callousness and sheer vanity were, as is so often the case, his undoing. He wasn’t quite as clever as he thought he was. In the letter he’d confessed guilt and, aside from not showing any genuine guilt, had actually said he was glad to have shot one of his victims and that it was the victim’s own fault. This went down with his trial jury like the proverbial lead zeppelin.
Either through being arrogant enough to believe police really were that dumb or through sheer stupidity, he’d also written to Buckley, by then in police custody. The letter addressed to Buckley, telling him to put Betty Andrews on a train for Norfolk and then wire him using the alias ‘F.B. Parker’ to give him her arrival time, naturally fell into the hands of the Atlanta police. So, almost, did Frank Dupre. Almost, but not quite.
Like their colleagues in Chattanooga, Norfolk’s finest managed to let Dupre slip through their fingers. Sturdivant was infuriated, especially as he’d been ordered back to Atlanta from his previous wasted trip to Chattanooga. Then, just when it seemed as though Dupre might just evade capture, the case finally broke Sturdivant’s way.
Dupre’s habit of letter-writing had asserted itself again, this time with fatal consequences. He’d written to the pawnbroker in Chattanooga enclosing the pawnbroker’s ticket and asking him to wire the remaining $300 to ‘F.B. Parker, General Delivery, Detroit, Michigan.’ The pawnbroker, while not in custody, still wasted no time in handing the note to Chattanooga police who passed it on to their colleagues in Atlanta who, in turn, alerted their colleagues in Detroit. The trap was set and all Frank Dupre needed to do was walk right into it.
He did.
Dupre was arrested in Detroit Post Office and Sturdivant travelled to Detroit personally to collect him and bring him in for trial. The charge was murder. The sentence, if Dupre were convicted, was death by hanging. Public mood was strongly against the juvenile murderer and, given the evidence, especially that of the home-made ballistics tests and Dupre’s own letters (the one to the newspaper went over especially badly) the verdict was never really in any doubt. Nor was the sentence.
Dupre was convicted and condemned to hang. He was sent to the Fulton Tower jail in Atlanta to await his date with the hangman. Buckley drew a short sentence as an accessory, as did Betty Andrews. Then, in a shift of public opinion, not unusual for previously-reviled condemned inmates, people started to oppose Dupre’s death sentence. A huge campaign coalesced around fighting to have the sentence commuted. Thousands of letters were written to the Governor and the Georgia Prison Board demanding clemency on account of Dupre’s youth.
The old Fulton Tower jail in Atlanta.
They fell on deaf ears. Neither the Governor nor the Prison Board felt much like showing mercy to an arrogant, callous thief and murderer, and all requests were turned down. On August 25, 1922 Frank Dupre, the last man sentenced to hang in Georgia, mounted the gallows at Fulton Tower. As he walked his last mile he waved from the Tower to the large crowd gathered outside before plunging to his death.
But that wasn’t the end of the story. Frank Dupre was dead but, surprisingly, the gallows itself wasn’t far behind him. Georgia had long been home to a strong campaign against the gallows. Not for the abolition of capital punishment itself, but the replacement of the rope with the switch. The Georgia State Legislature finally bowed before the campaign and, while those condemned to hang would still hang, future condemned would ride the lightning. The electric chair had replaced the gallows and, on September 13, 1924, murderer Howard Henson became Georgia’s first ‘thunderbolt jockey in the new, specially-constructed death chamber at Reidsville Prison.
With the gallows discarded, Georgia’s condemned would now be Southern-fried.
Given Old Sparky’s reputation for not always providing the quick, clean, humane end its supporters were so keen on, Henson and around 300 other Georgians might have preferred it if the State had stuck with what it already had…